miércoles, 27 de marzo de 2013

The GRUB Battle Again: Getting Mageia to Coexist with AntiX

Regardless of what people say about netbooks, their portable factor is very convenient for teaching. However, I wanted to change some of the distros on the HD of my Dell Inspiron Mini 10. It formerly sported

Mandriva 2010.2 (main production distro)

Pardus 2011

Mepis 11

Mageia 2

Mandriva 2011

The problem was that Mandriva 2010 was way too old and Mandriva 2011 way too heavy for the little thing. Plus, I wanted a distro that could boot the small machine fast in case something popped up and all of the above distros booted in more than 1 minute and 15 seconds (well, except Mandriva 2011, which took a good 2 minutes on the modest specs of the computer).

So, I decided to clean up the partition table, which was a mess because all of my grub learning has taken place in the netbook, basically. Thus, I wiped out all the distros and created a new partition table to start afresh.

I decided to start by putting Mageia 2. The installation was OK as usual. Then, I installed AntiX because it picked up the Wifi of the machine and it includes LibreOffice (I tested Slitaz, but it would not pick up the wifi and Vector Light took 50 seconds to start). The installation went perfect and I placed the GRUB on its corresponding root partition.

The problem was that AntiX boots with GRUB2 and Mageia's GRUB, sitting comfortably on the MBR, simply refused to see AntiX. To make things worse, I have very little experience dealing with GRUB2, so I could not find the way to collect the information that I needed to edit GRUB manually.

Therefore, after trying everything I could think of and failing, I put the issue aside and installed Mepis 11 to see if its GRUB could pick up AntiX. Although I did not have any installation problems, Mepis installed a GRUB that saw Mageia, but AntiX continued on the hiding.

However, I had an idea: given than AntiX and Mepis share several points, why not trying with the information on Mepis' GRUB using the AntiX kernel?

It was sort of crazy but I gave it a try. So, once on Mepis, I went to /boot/grub and opened the file menu.lst with Kwrite and copied the entry for Mepis:

3. Top 1 Rescue Distro:SimplyMepis! When something goes truly wrong, you can always count on this Linux distribution to rescue the system, get into the Web, modify files and make back ups. All that without mentioning it is almost easier to use than Windows ;-)